Outpost, p.18
Outpost, page 18
When I later learned that many of the towers were automated it didn’t diminish my fascination. Instead the sentinels assumed a haunted quality, a lonely spectral aspect beautifully realised in the work of Eric Ravilious, whose watercolour and pencil works of Beachy Head lighthouse and the Belle Tout lantern room – at once subdued and dazzling – I’ve had pinned beside my desk for years.
I’ve always carried a torch for such outposts.
The last manned lighthouse on the British Isles, North Foreland in Kent, was computerised in 1998, ending a tradition of keepers dating back 400 years. Casting about for a manned tower to visit, I discovered that, save for a pair in Holland, almost all of Europe’s lighthouses are now empty. Those few that remain occupied are closed to the public, save one: Phare de Cordouan.
—
On the last day, pre-dawn, we padded through cool deserted streets to Gare de Bordeaux Saint-Jean. At 7 a.m. when our train pulled away the daylight was only just beginning to muster muzzy pink.
The journey was quiet; we soon left the city and began to shadow the Garonne river, running northwest to the coast, passing strung-out vineyards, forests, villages, a dew damp world, blue pine and terracotta.
Our first contact with the Garonne had been rather more hectic. On the afternoon of our arrival in the city we were booked on a boat tour but misjudged the time and had to run for it, Bordeaux streaming around us as we hared along.
Beyond the opera house we tore hard-right and met the river, a vast chocolate monster. But there, there was a boat and here, here was a Wonka-like figure with great moustaches, a flowing mustard scarf, bright green trousers and tweedy blazer. As we arrowed his way, he held his arms aloft, beaming, eyes wide. Slow yourself, he gestured, slow yourself, slow, catch your breath; the very best gestures for my thumping run-out heart.
Bruno Beurrier. ‘Phew!’ he said, clasping his chest in solidarity. ‘Have you humour?’
I have! I panted, puffed but game. I ha-ave. Just give me a moment.
(Humour pronounced so wonderfully, ‘Oo-Mah’, that I couldn’t help but smile.)
‘Your boat is there. Your captain is here!’ Bruno announced with a flourish, pointing to a handsome craft moored below us and introducing me to an open-faced mop-headed fellow in a roll-neck jumper. We all shook hands.
They had not left. We were not late! All was well. We would go to the ball on the river . . . now where was Nick? Oh gosh, his camera kit, poor man . . . he was with me at the opera house, but now . . . feet caught in a tram line? Fallen in the river? I hoped he hadn’t suffered. Oh, no, here he puffed now. Did he have a limp before?
Installed on the boat, Bruno took up his post as guide – a Janus role he played as both delighted host and needling Grand Inquisitor. He asked as many questions as he answered and expected cultured responses. Why, he wondered aloud, fixing me with a saddened eye, were we all so ignorant about Bordeaux, the most wonderful of cities. It was small comfort that he toyed and lambasted everyone on the boat similarly in a variety of languages, I felt that I’d personally disappointed the man.
Why, for example, was I unaware that Bordeaux’s name flows from the French au bord de l’eau, ‘along the waters’, and why (Dan) did I know next to nothing about Eleanor of Aquitaine, the reason Bordeaux is so synonymous with wine in the English-speaking world?
Sorry, Bruno, we all thought, shamefaced, shifting in our seats.
Forgiving us with a winning smirk and twirl of his scarf he launched into Eleanor of Aquitaine’s meteoric life and times: Queen Consort of both France and England and Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, she was Bordeaux. The people loved her and the fact her second marriage made the city an English territory in all but name was absolutely fine with them. It was this, her second marriage to Henry Plantagenet, which opened up the region’s wine to the English market. So much was exported to Britain that red wine en masse is known as Claret in the UK to this day, Dan.
Thank you, Bruno.
All the time we were tootling ‘ all aboard de l’eau’, past the vivacious doughnut whirl of La Cité du Vin – a museum dedicated to the wines and viticultures of the world. Designed by architects Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Desmazières to resemble wine swirling in a glass; ribboned gold and buxom. Older blocks of a Bauhaus nature jostle with silos and new dockside towers whilst thump in the middle growls the massive concrete bulk of a German U-Boat base, a brutal cave which, having survived the Second World War intact, has now been repurposed as an exhibition space and venue. In contrast to the submarine pens’ solid implacability, the fishermen’s sheds perched up on bandy footings which pock the riverbank beyond Pont d’Aquitaine were brilliantly eccentric.
The Garonne is not a dirty river, announced Bruno at one point, daring us to defy him. In fact the people of Bordeaux do not consider the Garonne a river at all! We call it ‘the sea’, he concluded triumphantly, pointing to the rise and fall of the massive tidal range which milled and darkened the banks either side. Later that night I watched the dark waters run north from the city’s eighteenth-century heart, surging under Napoleon’s Bridge towards the Atlantic, flexing molassed and muscular. Undeniable. Vital. Deific.
—
Le Verdon sur Mer was the end of the line. Our train was an incongruous silver bug in the red rail yard. We were two of three people to disembark. The air smelled of pine sap, salt and tar. It was only just after nine o’clock but the day was mugging up. We crossed the tracks, walked through the town towards distant cranes and along a pristine beach to a marina where we found coffee, the Cordouan ferry kiosk and our boat, La Bohème. Also at the marina was Jean-Marie Calbet, one of the foremost lighthouse experts in France and President of the Association pour la Sauvegarde des Phares de Cordouan. He greeted me with a firm handshake and explained, to my delight, that he was there to accompany and inform. Ahead of my visit I’d spoken to Magali Pautis from SMIDDEST – Joint Association for the Sustainable Development of the Gironde Estuary – for advice about visiting Cordouan. At the time I’d sensed I was talking to someone of phenomenal organisation but I’d no idea she’d be so helpful and pull out all the stops to provide me a tour by a world leading expert. This rather flew in the face of my general modus operandi – ‘ Normally I’d flag down a boat, turn up unannounced, and knock at the lighthouse hoping someone was in,’ I told Nick, only half joking. Jean-Marie was an enthusiastic barrel of a man in white polo shirt, shorts and crocs. He would be delighted to guide us right to the top, he said, to the lantern room normally locked ‘because of poisonous mercury fumes’.
Delight all round. How exciting! This was more like it – a most welcome frisson of danger. Nick! Did you hear that, Nick? Mercury! I know! Oh, don’t be like that . . .
I later made a video of Jean-Marie inside the Fresnel belvedere, demonstrating the mechanisms of the light and rotary shutter floating on their quicksilver bath. ‘The lamp is fixed. The only moving thing is the screen,’ he explained, spinning the tricorn octagonal shade. ‘Turning, it gives the impression that the lamp is flashing. You cannot see the mercury but when there is a tempest the top of the lighthouse moves and we have mercury on the floor. I was here for a storm of about 180kph, it was quite a good one. [He smiled, we laughed nervously.] So, of course, it moves but you can’t appreciate it.’
I’d be too busy rocking in the foetal position, I thought, and noticed Nick was looking rather green – but that might have just been the vitrine’s emerald glass. Myself, I was cast scarlet by a red wall which painted sea and sky as a world-ending fire. I was having a brilliant time.
To reach that highest hothouse paned red, white and green – tricoloured more Italian than French though it stands at the mouth of one of the largest estuaries in France – we’d climbed seven storeys, some sixty-five metres, 301 interior steps. We’d spiralled round warm stone walls like freckled parchment on stairs which began counter-clockwise then reversed, ‘to stop the keepers getting dizzy’.iv
Cordouan had grown from the moment La Bohème rounded Pointe de Grave and slipped into the swim of the mercurial Gironde, the Garonne’s massive fishtail endgame. At first I saw it as a far-off peg, a nubbin, but every time I turned to look again, every time I blinked, the lighthouse grew – subliminally at first, then in startling instalments, until the moment we landed on the sandbank foreshore when I looked back at the boat then up at the tower to discover it grown exponentially, having apparently torn towards me whilst my back was turned – a pale king hanging over all.
We entered Cordouan’s fort-quoit base through a stepped tunnel, meeting and shaking hands with the keepers beside the several-inches-thick front door. Then we were into architect Louis de Foix’ ornate interior. The base dates from 1611. The atmosphere is church-like, the echoes rich and sonorous, corkscrewing stairs like a belfry. First floor, an apartment for the French king, of course. Second floor, a chapel to the Virgin Mary and the architect, it seemed. Ho ho. She has a statue and altar, he a handsome bust below a rapturous inscription which he likely dictated, beneath a coffered dome ceiling akin to the Pantheon in Rome. The stained glass was exquisite, although Jean-Marie suggested it was ‘hanging around’ at the glaziers’ at a time of renovation and slotted into the chapel with minimal tweaks. None of the saints or scenes depicted relate to Cordouan or the sea, he told us, before adding as an upbeat afterthought, ‘Of course, they all look very nice!’
Onwards. Up to two more floors of intricate tiling and interlocking limestone – our steps and conversation turned the helter-skelter whirl of stairs into a whispering gallery – it was actually quite moving just how beautiful the space sounded and looked bathed in oblique afternoon sun.
In 1786 it was decided to add twenty metres to the original base. Everything above the chapel was rebuilt by architect Joseph Teulère and the masonry attests to his artistry and skill. The strength and functionality of the space around me were clearly assembled with the most deft craft and pride, each block honed and fitted with such precision that the lime mortar joints were almost invisible. Here a keystone shaped like a half-moon radiated fine lines, manifest beauty and stability. The ivory colour of the tower’s interior – the symmetry rounding cantilevered stairs – suggested that we might be climbing to the top of an organic carapace, a helical shell.
Equally, we could have been ascending a castle turret or cathedral spire – as, in a way, we were – but reminders of the beacon’s function were everywhere in its high hollow form. Here was intricately coiled rope below a winch. This was the lamp room where fuels were raised for the lamp which burnt, at various stages in the signal’s life, wood, whale oil, coal, kerosene and petrol.
Sixth floor, the watch room, a circular bunk vault of dark wood where the keepers took turns to sleep and tend to the lantern lit above them.
Top floor, a short flight of metal stairs – a strange aberration, new sounds – then a sudden inundation: the lantern room, a crystal world of prisms, glass. The sound expanded, the view exploded, the sea, the sea; the Atlantic spread red, green and blue to the ends of the curving Earth.
Cordouan is unique – the only operational offshore lighthouse in the world both manned and open to visitors; the first to be listed as a historic monument; the first French beacon to employ parabolic reflectors and the test bed for Fresnal’s rotating system of concentric lenses.v The lantern room, whilst generally closed to the public, can be viewed very well from the external balcony which runs around the lighthouse top. On the day I visited a brisk wind was whisking, so a buffeting turn about the outer circle was thrilling. I hugely recommend it.
Jean-Marie and his team are doing the most wonderful job of preserving and safeguarding the fabric of Cordouan. When I visited, some of the tower’s lower flanks were caged in scaffolding as part of an ongoing effort to restore and replace carved limestone features blasted and smashed by the sea. It is a constant battle, one the sea will always win, Jean-Marie told us with a cheerful shrug, ‘but we carry on’. And it’s not only the ocean which wishes to carry Cordouan away – ‘One day a keeper arrived by boat, this was many years ago, to find two people already here, trying to crowbar the statuary. He asked them what they thought they were doing and they were shocked that anyone would care. They thought the lighthouse was too old to be working, they thought it was . . . redundant? Is that the word?’
Around the base were lodgings for the workmen and the keepers, curved and fitted together like everything at Cordouan with cabinet-maker’s care. One apartment, allotted to the lighthouse inspectors who used to sail around checking the fitness and upkeep of the beacons in their care, had been kept as it was built in the late nineteenth century. Panelled walls, a marble fireplace, a snug cot-style of bed, and a most intricate double door arrangement – two stout doors hinged parallel so they closed together, a soundproof box to shut out the roar of tempests.
A large-scale map in Cordouan’s entrance hall depicted the different coloured quadrants of its light as a kind of navigational pie chart. When sailors were positioned so they saw Cordouan’s light as green, they were on the right path to enter and exit the Gironde, deep waters, clear channels, safe passage. When they saw red, they were not. The map also showed the area’s other lighthouses and beacons and I suddenly saw Cordouan in context, one of a number of towers and transmitters controlling the seaspace here – collecting, instructing and handing ships on, each to the next, in weather fair or foul, high tides and low. Some signals were radio, some were of light, some called you forward – specifically asked you to arrow and home – whilst others were guides in a broader sense. Cordouan stood out like a traffic policeman, pivoting to beckon, slow, start, pause, stop – ordering and steadying the estuary flow. Working its debouchment beat for over 400 years.
As we sailed away at the end of the day, I kept my eyes on Cordouan – a solitary chessman, apparently aloof on its amber sandbank but actually a figure in a much bigger scheme. The lighthouses I’d always imagined as single stars had been revealed by Jean-Marie to be a close-knit constellation. Rather than intransigent monoliths booming ‘HALT’ and ‘DOOM’, Cordouan and its brothers keep the sea lanes moving.
I’d known remarkably little about lighthouses before today, it turned out, but that was part of the reason why Phare de Cordouan had been such a pleasure to visit and explore. The beacon had raised questions of what constituted ‘the edge’. The word ‘hidden’ is antithetical to lighthouses, they’re there to be seen and regarded. As so often in this book, I saw I had to better define my terms; Cordouan had revealed a world of ships and shipping which whirls away unseen and likely unsuspected by those of us ashore – a system beyond our purview.
How far is the horizon? How far out must one sail before slipping beyond the scope of those on land? A ridiculously short distance. As little as three miles.vi
Cordouan – King of Lighthouses – reigns 4.3 miles offshore.
The fanal frontier? It depends where you stand.
Phare de Cordouan, France. Photograph: Nick Herrmann
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i According to a note by Eliot under the title, ‘The Dry Salvages – presumably les trois sauvages – is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the north east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.’ – ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, Faber, London, 2001, p.21.
ii Smeaton’s Tower is the upper portion of John Smeaton’s original Eddystone Lighthouse of 1759, which originally stood on Eddystone Rocks, a little over twenty-two kilometres to the south of Plymouth. In 1877, when erosion of the ledge on which it was built forced the construction of a replacement beacon, Smeaton’s Tower (the third on the site) was dismantled and rebuilt on the Hoe.
iii A favourite tale he particularly enjoyed telling was about the time his train smashed through a set of oak crossing gates on the Wellington Bank in Somerset and ‘blew them to matchwood, nothing left. We were going like the clappers, a hundred miles an hour down over the bank, then BANG! The steam locomotive, not a scratch.’ See also – the time he drove his motorbike from Clifton Downs to Temple Meads station, through the centre of Bristol in under three minutes, at an average speed of eighty miles an hour, during blackout; the time he loosed a box of mice into the Post Office typing pool; the time his army unit accidentally blew the windows out of Lincoln Cathedral; the time a tin of molasses spilled over the conveyors at Bristol Sorting Office . . .
iv So Jean-Marie Calbet told us and so I repeat here in absolute good faith.
v Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), French physicist and civil engineer who correctly postulated that light has a wave-like motion transverse to the direction of propagation, contrary to the longitudinal direction suggested by Christiaan Huygens and Thomas Young.
vi For an observer of average height (5ft 7in) standing on the ground, the horizon is at a distance of 2.9 miles. The same person standing on a hill or tower of 100 metres (330ft) in height can see the horizon twenty-two miles away. Were they to climb to the top of Mount Everest (a mountain of 8,848 metres) the horizon would be 209 miles’ distant.
VIII
FONDATION JAN MICHALSKI POUR L’ÉCRITURE ET LA LITTÉRATURE, SWITZERLAND – NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2017
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
– Thomas Mann1
I am in Switzerland to write. I’m here for six weeks. So far I have transcribed a lot of Mars conversations and written up my recent trip to Cordouan.
Every hour, like clockwork, a train passes below. Two green carriages appear through a gap in the woods and amble a wide arc down to Montricher station, pause a moment then carry on to L’Isle, passing back a half hour later. It’s very comforting, as much a part of the landscape as the farms and barns, trees and cows – the tram-train’s whistle as familiar as the klang clonk of their bells.
